JEROME, Sr, commonly accounted the most learned of the Latin fathers, was born at Stridon, a city of Pannonia, about, as it appears, A.D. 342. His father's name was Eusebius, that of his mother is unknown; he had a sister, who gave herself up to a religious life; and a brother, Paulinian, much younger than himself. When about twenty-five years old he came to Rome in the Episcopate of Damasus, and studied under the celebrated grammarian Donatus. He here received baptism; after which he went into Gaul, and spent a considerable time at the city of Treves, where he made himself familiar with the writings of the great St Hilary, transcribing more than one of them with his own hand. He then passed a short time at Aquilia, where he became acquainted with many eminent men, amongst whom were Rufinus and Heliodorus; with the latter of these, Evagrius, a priest of Antioch, and some others, he travelled through Thracia, Pontus, Bithynia, Galatia, and Cappadocia. From thence he passed into the East, and staid some time at Jerusalem; from which city he came to Antioch, where he made acquaintance with Apollinaris, who had not then openly taught his heresy. In 372 he retired to a desert lying between the countries of Syria and Arabia, where he employed himself in the study of the Hebrew language, and began his commentaries on the books of Scripture. After studying four years in these wilds, and seeing one of his companions leave him, two others sink under the hardships and privations of their desert life, and being himself much enfeebled by sickness, he abandoned for the present the life of a solitary, and came to Antioch. The church of this city was at that time divided by the factions of Paulinus, Meletius, and Vitalis, each of whom claimed to be its bishop. St Jerome, by the direction of Damasus, acknowledged Paulinus; and, about the year 375, was ordained priest by him, but upon condition that he should not be compelled to abandon the crematical life, nor to perform any of the duties of his office. At the time of his ordination, or probably a little before, he had been assailed by the opposite factions of the Arians and Sabellians as to the sense in which he understood the word Hypostasis; a term which had formerly been used to express equally the Divine Nature and the Persons of the Holy Trinity; but which, since a council held at Alexandria in the year 362 at which the great St Athanasius presided, had been chiefly confined to the latter sense. St Jerome, when it was demanded of him, whether, with the Arians, he acknowledged three Hypostases; or, with the Sabellians, only one, replied, with great exactness and propriety, "If Nature be understood by this term, there is only one; but if Person, there are three." On account of these divisions he left Antioch, and fixed his abode at Bethlehem. In 380 he went to Constantinople, and became the pupil of Gregory of Nazianzum, the bishop of that city. In the
Jerome, St. following year Gregory resigned his see, and Jerome returned to Syria. Soon afterwards, with Paulinus of Antioch and St. Epiphanius, he revisited Rome, and was made his secretary by Damasus, taking at the same time the spiritual care of several eminent Romans of both sexes. In 385, the year following the death of Damasus, he returned to the East, saw St. Epiphanius as he passed through Cyprus, went to Antioch and Jerusalem, spent a month with the blind Didymus, then one of the most celebrated teachers at Alexandria, visited some of the Egyptian monasteries, and thence returned to Bethlehem, where he spent the remainder of his life as head of a monastic institution, and where he composed the greater number of his works. Towards the close of his life Palestine suffered much from an invader of barbarians; and in 416, after the Council of Diospolis, the Pelagians, supported by John the heretical bishop of Jerusalem, sent bands of armed men to destroy the monastery of their opponent, St. Jerome, and disperse the religious of both sexes who lived under his direction. A deacon was killed, and St. Jerome himself escaped with difficulty by flight. After this he continued his literary labours for four years; and on the 30th September, A.D. 420, he died. His most valuable work is his Latin version of the Old and New Testaments, commonly called the Vulgate; of which, however, the Psalter is not his, it having been made from the Septuagint, and not from the Hebrew, which St. Jerome always followed. The books of the Apocrypha, except Tobit and Judith, he also omitted, as not being contained in the Hebrew canon. St. Jerome enjoyed very singular advantages for the performance of this great undertaking, not only from his intimate acquaintance with the Hebrew, his long abode in Syria, and his knowledge of the places, local traditions, and customs of the country, but also from the fact of the existence in his time of the Hexapla of Origen, by the Greek version of which (the most accurate of any extant) he was enabled to correct both the commonly received Greek and the ancient Italic texts. The Council of Trent declared the Vulgate to be an authentic version, and corrected editions of it were published by the popes Sixtus V. and Clement VIII., A.D. 1590, 1592, 1593. We are also indebted to St. Jerome for the best commentary extant on the prophets, for one on Ecclesiastes, on St. Matthew, and the Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, and Philemon. He was besides one of the chief polemical writers of his age, opposing vigorously the Montanists, Helvidius, Jovinian, Rufinus and the Origenists, the Luciferians, Vigilantius, and Pelagius. He translated a work of Didymus on the Holy Ghost, composed a biographical account of the lives and writers of those ecclesiastical authors who had flourished before his time, and made several additions to the Chronicon of Eusebius, which he continued to the year 378—it is contained in the eighth volume of the edition of Villarsius. He also left behind him more than 150 letters on different subjects connected with theology and the Scriptures. St. Jerome, in his very valuable commentary on the prophets, opposes the literal and semi-Judaic ideas of Theodore, "the interpreter," as he is called, who was bishop of Mopsuestia in the time of St. Jerome, and one of the chief doctors and representatives of the school of Syria and Antioch (See THEODORE of Mopsuestia.) He had attacked St. Jerome, as it appears, under the name of Aram, for teaching the doctrines of original sin, and the remission of sins by the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper. Theodore, wherever it is possible, gives to the prophecies meanings exclusively literal and temporal, the result of which is, of course, to deprive us of that evidence of our religion which prophecy supplies, to divest the typical writings of the Old Testament of great part of their meaning, and, by confining the promised blessings to a particular locality, to do away with all idea of a church Christian and universal. Thus the
very remarkable words of Hosea vi., 2, 3—"After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth,"—are explained by Theodore, merely of the restoration of the chosen people to their temporal prosperity after the Assyrian captivity; but St. Jerome, as might be expected, explains them of the resurrection of Christ, and the regeneration of the human race through it. The words of chap. xiii. 14, of the same prophet,—"I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction,"—Theodore treats in the same manner, and refers for their fulfilment to the same period, but St. Jerome applies them in their most perfect meaning to the death of Christ. The commencement of the 2d chap. of Joel,—"The day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand: a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness,"—Theodore supposes to describe a merely physical obscurity, which, he says generally, and without allusion to any specific event, was fulfilled in the days of Hezekiah and Sennacherib; and "the day of the Lord," he thinks to be a period of intolerable calamity caused by the Assyrians. St. Jerome gives to both a spiritual and Christian meaning, extending them from the narrow and partial one of Theodore, to the end of all things, and the final day of judgment. Lastly, notwithstanding the apostolic declaration of the fulfilment in our Lord's betrayal, of the words of Zechariah xi. 12, 13,—"They weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said unto me, cast it unto the potter: a goodly price that I was prized at of them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord,"—Theodore maintains that the number "thirty" there mentioned, is not to be taken to signify any fixed sum, "but merely to show the great benevolence of the people to the prophet, and their honourableness;" whilst the casting of the thirty pieces to the potter, means, according to him, merely the trial of the people through the furnace of their sufferings. St. Jerome pointedly opposes both ideas, as he does Theodore's assertion, that "the rising of the sun of righteousness" in Malachi, means only the victories of the Maccabees. We conclude St. Jerome to be opposing Theodore, not only from the internal evidence afforded by a comparison of their respective works, but because the former more than once makes allusion to some living person of note whose name he will not mention, and who, from his method of dealing with prophecy, should rather, he says, be termed a Jew than a Christian. It is clear that there was no one of those times but Theodore who answers to St. Jerome's description. The style of St. Jerome varies according to the nature of his subject. In his controversial works he is exceedingly pointed and cutting, and proves himself a considerable master of rhetoric and logic; and shows, moreover, his acquaintance with the writings of the ancient philosophers and poets, by introducing frequent citations from their works. Simplicity and earnestness are the chief characteristics of his commentaries. In those on the prophetic writings, his intimate knowledge of Jewish habits and antiquities, has enabled him to do more perhaps than any other commentator to elucidate that portion of the sacred text. The best edition of his works is that of Villarsius, 11 vols. folio, Verona, 1734-40. (G. F. D.)